I hear you. I’m not crazy about it either. I use it at work and I get the point: it’s awkward to make CSS respect the encapsulation of component-based reactive frameworks like Vue or React. Tailwind alleviates that. On the other hand the actual HTML/CSS produced is disregarded by all measures except size maybe. It’s yet another layer of abstraction and its necessity is debatable at best.
That’s what I mean though, that the popular frameworks are made to fight the cascade.
Modern web development claims that apps aren’t documents and simply disregarded the cascade as an artifact of document-based design, but they’re entirely wrong IMO. The cascade is made for consistency and tempo of your websites, and that’s a universal design principle irrespective of whether you’re making a website, woodcrafting, pottery, or what have you. Tailwind itself claims to give devs the ability to be consistent, but we already have that, and it’s the cascade.
Managing the cascade is, understandably, non-trivial, especially in a large enough team. It requires discipline and a good understanding of what not to do, and can take time to practice and perfect. So I understand that in our crazy economic world where speed is everything, learning something new is treated as something that’s in the way, and so we churn out devs that aren’t proficient in CSS, and they then come to train other devs, who will also not be proficient in CSS. This all lowers the barrier of entry, which is good when looked at microscopically, but in the grand scheme of things, so much of our energy is put into fighting the cascade. Just think of all the styling solutions for CSS-in-JS frameworks that we’ve churned through in the last 10 years. Madness IMO, but economies gotta economize.
Edit: yeah sorry, I get really passionate about this topic
I hear you. I’m not crazy about it either. I use it at work and I get the point: it’s awkward to make CSS respect the encapsulation of component-based reactive frameworks like Vue or React. Tailwind alleviates that. On the other hand the actual HTML/CSS produced is disregarded by all measures except size maybe. It’s yet another layer of abstraction and its necessity is debatable at best.
That’s what I mean though, that the popular frameworks are made to fight the cascade.
Modern web development claims that apps aren’t documents and simply disregarded the cascade as an artifact of document-based design, but they’re entirely wrong IMO. The cascade is made for consistency and tempo of your websites, and that’s a universal design principle irrespective of whether you’re making a website, woodcrafting, pottery, or what have you. Tailwind itself claims to give devs the ability to be consistent, but we already have that, and it’s the cascade.
Managing the cascade is, understandably, non-trivial, especially in a large enough team. It requires discipline and a good understanding of what not to do, and can take time to practice and perfect. So I understand that in our crazy economic world where speed is everything, learning something new is treated as something that’s in the way, and so we churn out devs that aren’t proficient in CSS, and they then come to train other devs, who will also not be proficient in CSS. This all lowers the barrier of entry, which is good when looked at microscopically, but in the grand scheme of things, so much of our energy is put into fighting the cascade. Just think of all the styling solutions for CSS-in-JS frameworks that we’ve churned through in the last 10 years. Madness IMO, but economies gotta economize.
Edit: yeah sorry, I get really passionate about this topic